SOLVED

Integration of personal calendar with bookings calendar

Copper Contributor

A fundamental requirement to make the app usable is to integrate the user's own 365 calendar with the bookings calendar.

 

Firstly I see this link suggesting that time can be blocked out when the personal calendar is full:

 

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Sync-staff-s-personal-calendar-with-Microsoft-Bookings-23ee...

 

Unfortunately, the tick-box option referred to here isn't present on my roll-out. Why is this?

 

Secondly, I'd like to be able to see the booking in the user's own diary - or, at least, to be able to see the Bookings calendar as a calendar set in outlook so I can overlay the two. Is there an option to do this?

43 Replies

I just tried setting it up and the "Events on personal calendar affect availability" setting makes no difference.  If I manually add an appointment to the personal calendar of the user, clients can still book conflicting appointments through public Bookings page.  Just wasted 2 hours on the phone with tech support only for the tech to tell me at the end that the appointment made by the client is merely a request that could be declined if there is a conflict.  I had to show him the page that describes the intended behavior.  I guess after 2 hours of "troubleshooting", he forgot what he was attempting to fix in the first place.  Extremely aggravating experience when I understand the product better than tech support personal even though I've had maybe 60 mins on it while testing the functionality.

Hi Evan, I'll follow up with you offline about this.

 

Thanks,

Neel Joshi

Microsoft Bookings Team

Hi Gabriel,

I am trying to get my Bookings calendar to show up in my Outlook for Windows. I have followed the instructions above but I am confused as to what exactly I am looking for in the GAL? If I search my name and double click it just duplicates my current calendar.

Hi Louise,

 

I am sorry if the instructions above were not clear enough.

Once you open the GAL, you should search for the name of the Bookings calendar you created. I.e. "My business calendar".

 

I am attaching an image that could help.

 

Let me know if this helps.

 

Thanks!

No unfortunately it is is not there.

 

My company provides the premium service and we currently use another scheduling software.  I saw this new app today and was hoping it could replace the other software.

 

Maybe I missed something and I dont have it set up correctly?

 

I set up the "business"   

It is published

I even ran a test and it worked.

 

I am missing something I just don't know what.

 

I will keep trying.

 

I did attach an image of what I am showing as the GAL

 

Thank you.

 

Louise

 

 

 

 

Hi Louise,

 

Did you search for the name of the "business" that you added in the GAL?

 

-Thanks,

 

Hi Chandresh

Yes. Not there.

-Thanks,
Hi Chandresh Jain

I think I have it troubleshooted as to WHY it will not integrate.


My company Outlook is hosted by an Exchange server. It isn’t actually part of Office 365. Instead of connecting to an Office 365 server, we connect to Intermedia. So…even though the Bookings is pretty awesome it is not something I can use that way (which is a bummer).

Would LOVE it if it could work.

Thanks,

Hi Louise,

 

Unfortunately  - currently, we have personal calendar integration support only for O365 accounts.  We will consider adding support for external emails too.

 

-Thanks,

Chandresh

Hi Neel,

I'm having the same trouble as Evan, where the 'Events on Office 365 Calendar Affect Availability' checkbox does not seem to make a difference and customers are still able to book conflicting appointments.


Was a solution ever reached that prevents conflicting appointments from being booked?

 

Thanks,

Nik

Hey Nikolas,

 

The issue Evan had was that the staffs O365 calendar wasn't set to share free/busy information inside their organization. Here's how you can make sure your staff calendar is setup correctly:

 

  1. Have the staff member sign into Outlook Web App and navigate to their Calendar
  2. Click the "Share" action at the top of the calendar
  3. Confirm that "My Organization" is set to anything but "Not shared"

 

Let me know if that helps!

 

Neel

Hi, Chandresh --

 

I want to make sure I understand the issue of Exchange-hosted email.   We had a locally hosted email but migrated it to O365 last year.   Our domain is still controlled off our local server which syncs with O365 through Azure.  But our email is now hosted at O365.   But permissions on email and calendar accounts are tricky because they seem to be controlled by a combination of options in O365 and options on our domain controller.  

 

In this setup, should the Bookings app work with full functionality, including the integration of personal calendars and the Bookings calendar?   If the Bookings events do not show up on my personal calendar without conflicts (and without manual input), it will not be useful to me.   I am considering upgrading to O365 Business Premium primarily to get the Bookings app, but I want to make sure it is going to work.  I installed the Candidly app, but it did not integrate fully.   It would read my O365 calendar and avoid conflicts with events already on the calendar, but it would not add the Candidly events to my calendar.  I gave up on it and started looking at Bookings.

 

Thanks

 

Kyle

 

Hi Kyle,

 

Sorry for the late reply here.  As long as the Booking mailbox and your personal mailbox are both hosted in the cloud (Office 365) in the same tenant, personal calendar integration should work as advertised.

 

You can  sign up for a free trial of business premium at https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-business-premium    to try your setup and see if it helps.  

 

Please feel free to let me know if you have further questions.

 

-Thanks,

Chandresh

Where are we with this? I'm in Microsoft's backyard, and the issue essentially makes Bookings useless to me.

can you clarify what issue you mean here - the personal calendar integration has been available for quite some time now  as long as the staff is in the O365 cloud as well.  Is that not working for you?

The only way it works is if we label the event 'busy'. For a vacations, we typically label it 'out of office'. Anything aside from 'busy', and bookings can still be made.
 
I did have to go into calendar, delete and re-add staff in order to get calendars to sync.

Out of office should be treated as busy and not bookable - can you please use the feedback link from bookings module in the web and share the details (maybe screenshots or your bookings page link) and someone will follow up if you are hitting an issue there.

The staff should have a checkbox to sync their calendars in the staff configuration page - but yes, delete and re-add should work to as this is the default now.

Will do, thanks.
Also, please make sure that the Out of office events are on your primary calendar.
They are, for sure. In fact, I added one about an hour ago, and bookings still shows me available. I'll send through bookings module. The second I moved the vacation to 'busy', it reflected. When I moved back to 'out of office' I was available again...